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Dragon Age: The Veilguard Faces 'Uphill Battle' to Match Inquisition's Launch Sales, Says Circana Analyst Mat Piscatella

Thick Thighs Save Lives

NeoGAF's Physical Games Advocate Extraordinaire
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Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched on October 31, and we've already got a tiny window into how well it's selling. It debuted at No.6 on Circana's report of the top selling games in the US for the full month, just after Metaphor: ReFantazio. But its placement on a single chart doesn't quite tell the full story.

We reached out to analyst Mat Piscatella at Circana following the report to get a little more info on just how well Veilguard was doing, and he offered some context. Though it might look like Dragon Age is being soundly beaten by a number of other debut titles for the month of October, he notes that Dragon Age launched on October 31, and the chart tracks through November 2. So Dragon Age only had three days of sales reflected in the chart, while most other games on it had significantly more.
Additionally, Piscatella pointed out that EA does not provide Steam data for the best-selling titles charts, so while other games (including Metaphor) had Steam digital sales reflected, Dragon Age's numbers are only for PlayStation and Xbox.

"Were Dragon Age: The Veilguard's PC volume included it would have placed higher on the best-selling titles chart — perhaps as high as 3rd overall," he says. "Unfortunately, however, digital sales are included in these specific charts only at the discretion of the publisher."
For more info, we asked Piscatella if there was any way to compare The Veilguard's launch sales to its Dragon Age predecessors, but Circana's weekly data only goes back to 2018, so no dice there. However, Piscatella did have some analysis to add about how things were going:

"Just looking at the first days of sales and initial engagement levels via Circana's Player Engagement Tracker, it's been a good - but not great - launch," he said. "Dragon Age: The Veilguard did not reach the launch week sales levels of either Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth or Dragon's Dogma II, and it will be a bit of an uphill battle to reach Inquisition's lifetime sales. But again, it's very early and a lot of the story is left to be told. November will give us a much better read."
Though we don't have sales numbers for Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, Square Enix has said they did not meet their internal expectations. Meanwhile, Capcom reported that Dragon's Dogma 2 was a success for them, having passed 2.5 million copies sold as of this past April. We do have a bit more comparison context through sales numbers in the UK, courtesy of GamesIndustry.biz. Dragon Age: The Veilguard debuted at No.7 on UK sales charts, but its first week sales were over 18% lower than those of Dragon's Dogma 2 and nearly 21% below those of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth.
 

Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
3 weeks and no update on the sales.

I don’t think it’s a disaster, but I think it underperformed.
 
Well deserved for such a trash game with shitty writing, shitty characters and having one of the worse characters Taash in gaming, plus pushing disgusting and insane things on people.

The sale could probably be okay IF this was one of those lower AA budget games like SH2, Stellar Blade, Relink etc. But definitely not with Veilguard's high AAA budget which most likely cost even more than Rebirths since the latter could reuse a lot of asset. And it did worse than Rebirth which already had sales below expectaiton and that still surpassed Wokeguard in just one platform while Shitguard was on multiple platfotms.

Shame since a big budget western fantasy game could have great potential, could have been like the present day Skyrim or Witcher 3 with huge success and great reception if it didn't push their insane crap on people and had better writing.
 

Dazraell

Member
3 weeks and no update on the sales.

I don’t think it’s a disaster, but I think it underperformed.
Good old Andy Wilson is already training his speech for next investor call where he will try to spin this into success by saying something in a lines of "game had amazing reception from critics but sales wasn't as high as they hoped for, but they're happy with all the reviews proclaiming the return to form for BioWare", while not mentioning that Veilguard most likely sold even worse than Anthem lol
 

Da1337Vinci

Member
If we hear no numbers after Christmas is pretty much done. I see no reason why would EA even keep Bioware alive then.

They will just most likely delivered a mediocore mass effect entry.

Just to have some cloud with the hard-core players. They already have respawn for that.
 

Miyazaki’s Slave

Gold Member
The title is a single package with no upcoming DLC or expansion content planned for release. The game was released in 2024 and I doubt we will hear any confirmation from EA when it comes to Q1/2 forecasting for 2025.
We will hear the same terminology "soft", "unprecedented competitive landscape in terms of single player RPGs", "difficulty finding enough runway to build core player engagement in Q4" as we have from other publishers who have struggled to grab attention with existing (or new) IP this year.

As I have comments many times already I think the games environments are gorgeous and its technical polish and optimization (on PC for me anyway) are phenomenal...but this isn't "my" Dragon Age and its performance will indicate many others feel the same way is my guess.
 
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You are telling me that a new installment of an fan favorite series that:
  • Disqualified previous player choices in a series that once loudly boasted about carrying over player's choices
  • Went from Dark Morally Grey Fantasy to Disney Whimsy Quippy drivel shit
  • Went from an engaging hybrid real time/turn based party combat to GoW action dumb mode.
....might have difficulty hitting the sales pace of it's previous installment?!?

I was told this was return to form, Matt. I was told it by many, many press outlet. They literally all used the same terminology that it must be true for so many independent voices to all come to the exact same conclusion.
 
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